Full text: Homily of Cardinal Reina on third day of Novendiales
Cardinal Baldassare Reina, vicar general for the Diocese of Rome, preaches the homily during the third day of Novendiales Masses for Pope Francis at St. Peter’s Basilica on April 28, 2025. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA
CNA Newsroom, Apr 28, 2025 / 19:06 pm (CNA).
Editor’s Note: On April 28, 2025, Cardinal Baldassare Reina, vicar general for the Diocese of Rome, delivered the following homily during the third day of Novendiales Masses for Pope Francis. The text below is a CNA working translation of the Italian original published by the Vatican.
My frail voice is here today to express the prayer and sorrow of a portion of the Church — that of Rome — bearing the weight of the responsibility history has assigned to her.
In these days, Rome is a people mourning its bishop — a people, together with other peoples, who have lined up, finding a space among the city’s places to weep and pray, like “sheep without a shepherd.”
Sheep without a shepherd: a metaphor that helps us gather the feelings of these days and enter into the depth of the image we have received from the Gospel of John — the grain of wheat that must die to bear fruit. A parable that tells of the shepherd’s love for his flock.
In this time, while the world is burning and few have the courage to proclaim the Gospel and translate it into a concrete and possible vision of the future, humanity appears like sheep without a shepherd. This image leaves the mouth of Jesus as he gazes upon the crowds following him.
Around him are the apostles, reporting all they had done and taught: the words, gestures, and actions learned from the Master — the proclamation of the coming kingdom of God, the call to conversion, and the signs that gave flesh to the words — a caress, an outstretched hand, disarmed speech, without judgment, liberating, unafraid of contact with impurity. In performing this service, necessary to awaken faith and hope — that evil would not have the last word, that life is stronger than death — they did not even have time to eat.
Jesus senses the weight of this — and that comforts us now.
Jesus, the true shepherd of history in need of salvation, knows the burden placed on each of us in continuing his mission, especially as we find ourselves searching for his first shepherd on earth.
As in the time of the first disciples, there are successes and also failures, fatigue, and fear. The horizon is immense, and temptations creep in that veil the one thing that matters: to desire, seek, and labor in anticipation of “a new heaven and a new earth.”
This cannot be the time for balancing acts, tactics, caution, instincts to turn back, or, worse, revenge and power alliances, but rather we need a radical disposition to enter into God’s dream entrusted to our poor hands.
At this moment, I am struck by what Revelation says: “I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
A new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem.
Faced with the announcement of this newness, we cannot yield to that mental and spiritual laziness that ties us to past experiences of God and ecclesial practices, desiring they repeat endlessly, subdued by the fear of the losses required by necessary change.
I think of the multiple reform processes of Church life initiated by Pope Francis, which extend beyond religious affiliations. People recognized him as a universal pastor. These people carry concern in their hearts, and I seem to discern in them a question: What will become of the processes that have begun?
Our duty must be to discern and order what has begun, in light of what our mission demands of us, moving toward a new heaven and a new earth, adorning the Bride (the Church) for the Bridegroom.
Otherwise, we risk clothing the Bride according to worldly fashions, guided by ideological claims that tear the unity of Christ’s garment.
To seek a shepherd today means above all to seek a guide who knows how to manage the fear of loss in the face of the demands of the Gospel.
To seek a shepherd who bears the gaze of Jesus — the epiphany of God’s humanity in a world marked by inhumanity.
To seek a shepherd who confirms that we must walk together, integrating ministries and charisms: We are the people of God, constituted to proclaim the Gospel.
When Jesus sees the people following him, he feels compassion stir within him: He sees women, men, children, the elderly, the sick, the poor — and no one caring for them, no one feeding their hunger — the hunger of life turned harsh, and the hunger for the Word. Before these people, he feels himself to be their bread that will not fail, their water that quenches thirst endlessly, the balm that heals wounds.
He feels the same compassion Moses felt when, at the end of his days, from the heights of Mount Abarim, facing the Promised Land he would not enter, gazed upon the multitude he had guided and prayed to the Lord lest they become a flock without a shepherd.
That prayer is now our prayer — the prayer of the whole Church and of all men and women who ask to be guided and supported amid the struggles of life, among doubts and contradictions, orphans of a word that can guide them amid siren songs flattering instincts of self-redemption, that break solitude, gather the discarded, refuse to yield to tyranny, and dare not to bend the Gospel to tragic compromises of fear, worldly complicities, or blind, deaf alliances against the signs of the Holy Spirit.
The compassion of Jesus is the compassion of the prophets who reveal God’s suffering at seeing his people scattered and abused by bad shepherds — mercenaries who exploit the flock and flee at the sight of the wolf. Bad shepherds care nothing for the sheep, abandoning them to danger — and thus they are snatched and scattered.
But the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
This radical disposition of the shepherd is narrated in the Gospel of John proclaimed in this Eucharistic liturgy — a testimony of how Jesus could see beyond death, to the hour that would glorify his mission: the hour of death on the cross, revealing unconditional love for all.
“If the grain of wheat that falls to the ground does not die, it remains just a grain of wheat.” The grain that sought the earth through the incarnation of the Word, falling to raise those who had fallen, coming to seek the lost.
His death is a sowing that leaves us suspended in that hour, when the seed is no longer visible, hidden by the earth that causes us to fear it has been lost. A suspension that could anguish us but instead can become the threshold of hope, a fissure in doubt, a light in the night, a garden of Easter.
The promised fruitfulness belongs to this disposition to death: to become wheat ground down, hostage to infidelity and ingratitude — to which Jesus, the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, responds with forgiveness, praying to the Father while abandoned by his friends.
The good shepherd sows through his death, forgiving his enemies, preferring their salvation — the salvation of all — over his own.
If we want to be faithful to the Lord, to the grain of wheat fallen to the earth, we must sow our lives as well.
And how can we not recall the psalm: “Those who sow in tears shall reap with songs of joy”?
There are times, like ours, when, as the farmer to whom the psalmist refers, sowing becomes an extreme gesture, driven by the radicality of faith.
It is a time of famine — the seed thrown to the earth is drawn from the last reserve without which one dies. The farmer weeps because he knows that this final act demands risking his life.
But God does not abandon his people. He does not forsake his shepherds. He will not allow, just as with his Son, that they be left in the tomb of the earth.
Our faith safeguards the promise of a joyful harvest — but it must pass through the death of the seed that is our life.
That extreme, total, exhausting gesture of the sower made me think of Pope Francis’ Easter Sunday, of that outpouring of blessings and embraces to his people, the day before he died. The final act of his tireless sowing of the announcement of God’s mercies. Thank you, Pope Francis.
Mary, the holy Virgin whom we in Rome venerate as “Salus populi romani,” who now stands beside and watches over his mortal remains, receive his soul and protect us as we continue his mission. Amen.